Posters

I

Introduction

Posters, mass-produced advertisements or announcements, usually printed on large sheets of paper, for public display. Posters ordinarily consist of a colorful picture or illustration along with a short identifying text or trademark. They usually have a commercial purpose—to advertise products or publicize entertainment events—but they also occasionally appear as public education announcements, propaganda instruments, or pure works of art with no overt message.

Posters came into existence in the 15th century with the invention of the printing press. Usually unillustrated, the earliest posters carried royal proclamations, municipal decrees, announcements of fairs and markets, and occasionally advertisements for books. Small woodcut illustrations were used somewhat more frequently in later centuries, but they were relatively difficult to produce and were never common. Not until the 19th century did posters begin to assume their modern look.

II

Beginnings of the Modern Period

About 1800 two events gave birth to the modern era of poster production. One was the beginning of industrialization on a large scale, which created a need for extensive advertising. The other was the invention, in 1798, of a new printing method, lithography, that made it much easier for artists to include colored illustrations on posters. Poster production boomed throughout the first half of the 19th century, partly due to the development of high-speed printing presses, and posters were used to advertise everything from railroads to corsets to department stores. Also at this time, theatrical posters first appeared, often with realistic illustrations of scenes from the advertised plays, operas, or burlesques.

Most of these early posters were literal, straightforward, and relatively unimaginative. Not until the work of Jules Chéret, beginning in 1867, did the art of the poster begin to realize its full potential. Chéret revolutionized the look of posters. Whereas in earlier posters the illustrations were subordinate to the text, Chéret used the illustrations as the dominant features and reduced the text to a relatively minor explanatory role. His illustrations departed from literal depictions of the text. Instead of realistic scenes, he drew idealized figures, emphasizing prettiness, vitality, and movement. He specialized in theatrical posters, and a typical work (he produced nearly 1000) might feature an effervescent young woman in ruffles and flounces performing a cancan step against a filmy, pastel background. The text was minimal, usually a few words at the top or bottom of the poster announcing the name of the theater and the attraction presented.

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Chéret's methods spread quickly throughout Europe and America. Applied to posters for commercial products as well as theatrical events, these methods gave rise to visually charming poster art that appealed directly to the senses and was understandable even to the illiterate.

The new vitality of poster art led many well-known painters and artists to try their hands at the craft. The most important developments came in the 1890s, when French painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard and various art nouveau artists introduced important innovations.

III

The 1890s

Toulouse-Lautrec, the supreme poster artist of the 19th century, made significant changes in both the content and the artistic style of posters. He abandoned the lyrical impressionism of earlier styles, using instead large areas of flat color in his posters, a technique borrowed from Japanese prints. The idealized female figures of earlier works were replaced with naturalistic, almost caricatured people depicted in telling vignettes—a woman drinking at a bar, a gentleman kissing a woman at a table. In his work, the text of the poster steadily decreased in prominence as he concentrated all attention on the picture. One of Toulouse-Lautrec's last works, Jane Avril (1899), eliminates the text entirely (except for the name of the entertainer herself); it is the prototype for all modern, purely pictorial posters.

The art nouveau artists introduced an alternative pictorial style to that of Toulouse-Lautrec. Their pictures employed flowing lines and elegant elongated forms to create exotic, stylized illustrations. The most important art nouveau poster artists were the English Aubrey Beardsley, the Czech-French Alphonse Mucha, the Belgian Henry van de Velde, the Scottish Frances MacDonald and her sister Margaret MacDonald, the American Will Bradley, the Austrian Gustav Klimt, and the Dutch Jan Toorop. Van de Velde's Tropon poster (1899) was a landmark. He completely eliminated human figures from the picture, substituting an abstract design, to create a whole new category of poster design.

Bonnard, although not a prolific poster producer, made one highly influential innovation in his 1894 poster advertising the periodical La Revue Blanche. He used the text as an integral part of the illustration, intertwining the letters of the words with the painted picture and using small printed words to form the background. This new style had an invigorating effect on poster design well into the 20th century.

IV

The 20th Century

With World War I, beginning in 1914, poster art underwent an abrupt change. Posters became propaganda instruments and were also used to encourage army enlistment and to sell war bonds. Artistically, they were usually crude and blunt compared to previous styles. The most famous was American painter James Montgomery Flagg's I Want You (1917), showing a stern Uncle Sam pointing a finger directly at the viewer.

During the 1920s and 1930s, in the hands of artists such as Cassandre (the professional name of Adolphe Mouron) and Jean Carlu from France, and E. McKnight Kauffer from the United States, posters absorbed a multitude of influences, including cubism, surrealism, Dada, and art deco. The best-known works were Cassandre's art deco advertisements for the French National Railroads, such as Nord Express (1927), featuring trains and railroad tracks portrayed in an elegant, semiabstract, geometrical style.

During these years, two new types of poster also became popular—movie and travel posters. The latter had first been produced in 1908 by the London Transport Company, but during the 1930s they began to be used by all major transportation companies. Movie posters boomed in the wake of the popularity of silent films and, after 1929, sound films.

Also important in the 1920s and 1930s were noncommercial posters produced by serious artists, especially in Germany and Russia. Dada artists in Berlin and Russia, notably John Heartfield, George Grosz, and El Lissitzky from Russia, experimented with photographic (rather than painted) posters, often assembling complex photomontages from pieces of several photographs. The German Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin pioneered modern forms of graphic art, making the text of the poster an integral part of the design and in some cases using the words or letters of the text to create the entire design. The work of Austrian-born American Herbert Bayer carried graphic design to a level of sophistication not equaled until the 1960s.

During World War II (1939-1945), forceful propaganda posters were again produced, often by major artists such as Russian American Ben Shahn. Posters of the postwar period adapted and refined earlier trends, attracting the attention of serious painters such as Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, Frenchman Henri Matisse, Swiss Max Bill, and American Roy Lichtenstein, as well as several American graphic artists: Peter Max, Milton Glaser, and Tomi Ungerer. The principal artistic innovation of the postwar era has been the purely pictorial poster, which has no advertising or commercial purpose but carries an artistic or aesthetic message.